Technology can only go so far in helping us with work/life balance. If you feel stressed out but don't know why, you may need to clean up and organize your living space.
According to Dr. Manny Alvarez, Senior Managing Health Editor of FoxNews.com and Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Science at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, in a video from FoxNews.com, you can lower your stress by cleaning up clutter.
Personally, I cannot stand a messy room. Whenever I go to my friend's house, I automatically start to clean because the moment I set foot in her apartment, I feel anxiety and stress over the sheer clutter and dirtiness I see. Dishes are piled up, used water glasses cover the end tables and clothes are everywhere. But not everyone has the same level of organizational ability, which is why professional organizers are popular.
The article "Housekeeping Tips for Less Stress" from March 2009, mentions that cluttered homes are the norm. I think this may be a contributing factor as to why so many people of all ages feel stressed. Our lives are busy and technology allows us to multitask so we constantly feel rushed or off-focus, making it hard to quench feelings of stress. If we are welcomed after work by a messy, unorganized house, our stress level increases.
Messy homes hurt more than your mental energy, they also waste money. According to "Home Relaxation" from about.com, people who don't have a specific place for their belongings often forget where they are or buy more of the product. For example, my friend has about seven jars of peanut butter because she forgot she had them.
In fact, many experts will tell you that lack of organization is not only a major cause of stress but it is also a major cause of failing to achieve your goals in life. That's right. By becoming more organized, you can decrease your stress levels as well as increase your chances of achieving success in your life.
Psychologically, this makes sense. How can we keep our mind clutter and stress free if we are constantly bombarded with a messy home environment. Throughout my study of psychology, studies have shown that children who grow up in a clutter-free, organized and clean home are better able to adapt to their surroundings.
Below is a viral video about a woman who lives in a 90-square-foot apartment in Manhattan. Notice how stress-free she seems, all because she's able to maintain an organized home, despite its small size.
The working world has changed drastically in the past few decades. A male-dominated world is slowly turning to a female-dominated world with work/life balance shifting in importance, greatly assisted by technology.
In the last generation, women surged into the workforce on the waves of feminism, getting increasingly higher positions and dominating roles that men used to hold in both the home and the workplace. Because of this shift between roles, men have slowly started losing motivation and have begun to act more like boys according to the book Manning Up by Kay S. Hymowitz, which was reviewed on RealClearPolitics.com. We also see men using technology in a more narcissistic way than women, which could be due to natural instincts or men's rivalries with other men according to scienceandreligiontoday.com.
Another impact of women's move into the working world is the changes in work/life balance. According to an academic paper from worklifebalance.com, an international work-life balance training and consulting company, childcare, paternity/maternity leave, and work hours are among some of the changes the working world has seen in regards to work/life balance.
Now that women have become such a dominant force, I think men have shied away from responsibility and decision making, which used to be their expertise and their duty as husband and bread winner. In a 2011 article by Heather Wilhelm called "Men May Be Jerks... But Women Are Insane", she talks about our hyper-feminized world that disallows for men to feel the same motivation for success they once did in a male-dominated world. Conversely, many women have become "alpha-girls" in which they strive for success in their career. But this is not necessarily a good thing.
What all of this adds up to for women is a gap between the cultural ideals behind preadulthood-equality, freedom, personal achievement, sexual self-expression-and biology's pitiless clock.
With some men acting more like boys, a trend we see in countless sitcoms, their use of technology shifts. Many men play video games, buy expensive TVs and electronic gadgets to stay in competition with other men, proliferating the view that men use technology in a narcissistic way, as a 2011 article from scienceandreligiontoday.com points out.
Before women's surge into the workforce, companies didn't put as much stock into work/life balance because men were the breadwinners and women stayed at home. But now companies have to take maternity leave and childcare into account. According to the authors of a 2002 academic paper "Work-Life Balance... A Case of Social Responsibility or Competitive Advantage," 62.8 percent of traditional families are dual-income households. To attract these workers, companies offer childcare incentives, something that wasn't necessary in previous decades.
Check out this training video from 1944. Notice how the men talk about women and the progress we've made since.
I think that the changing dynamic between women and men and their relationship in the workforce will continue to change work/life balance and how we use technology to assist in those changes or to set ourselves apart from others.
Men and women are equal. Or are they? In my previous post, I explored why women feel guilty when their work interferes with their personal life. But I neglected to discuss men's feelings toward work's interference with family time and why women still feel guiltier than men.
Women manage all aspects of their lives just as well as men, yet they have more negative feelings about being contacted after hours. Melnick added that women feel distress even if their work doesn't interfere with their family time.
This distress could be caused by remaining traditional gender roles, though times have changed since Leave it to Beaver.
Women are no longer expected to remain at home to raise children or to be responsible for all domestic work. Despite changing attitudes towards women's roles, old traditions die hard. Women still feel it is their duty to raise their children. When work interferes with that innate duty, the result is guilt.
Men, on the other hand, have historically been the breadwinners and protectors of the family and their role hasn't changed as drastically as women's. So when work interrupted their family time, it was expected that the breadwinner will just take care of business, leaving the mother with the children. Now, with both parents working in many families, who will tend the children while the other works? How parents answer this question could lead to conflict.
In 2008, 59 percent of fathers in dual-income families reported interference between work and family life compared to 35 percent of fathers in 1977, said a March 26, 2009 article from USAToday. The article explains the increase:
It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook," says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon.
Up until the past decade, "men weren't doing enough to add stress to their lives," he says.
Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.
Women's guilt in response to work interfering with family time likely derives from remaining gender roles. Men are also feeling conflict because they are now expected to do more housework and more caretaking than in previous decades.
However, men and women agree on the changing gender roles. Overall, society is more accepting of working women, domestic dads, and dual-income families. More information on gender role statistics can be found here.
The definition of being a woman has evolved greatly in the past fifty years. They do housework, take care of children, run errands, and work outside the home, creating an added stress when work takes time away from home.
A longitudinal study, conducted in 2005 and 2007, was led by professor Scott Schieman from the University of Toronto. The study was released in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and featured in an article from CTVNews.com. The study suggests that women have more difficulty with the flexibility of technology, which allows for continuous contact with work. Schieman said:
We found that there was an association between receiving work-related contact and guilt for women. We didn't find that association for men. And then we also found it for distress as well.
But the researchers did not find the same results among men. Though men may still feel stressed when work emails pop up on their BlackBerrys during off hours, they do not experience the same level of guilt as moms do. In a March 9th ABC News article, Dr. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, co-director of the perinatal psychiatry program at the University of North Carolina Center for Women's Mood Disorders, commented:
A lot of this stress may also have to do with role perception. There's the notion that mothers should be at home caring for the child more so than fathers, who work to provide for the family. These are stereotypes, but these societal influences are still there.
Meltzer-Brody has a point. Society still expects women to take care of the family, with or without children, work, be independent, and take care of the house. Technology can help women manage their time because tasks do not take as long and there is an option of working from home.
However, some guilt doesn't have to be bad. A November 2011 article from stuff.co.nz said feeling guilt is a sign of responsibility. If I called in sick so I could go to a concert, I would feel guilty. I would feel responsible. Mothers who feel guilty about doing work outside of the office feel a responsibility for the well-being of their children. A little guilt is ok, but too much weighs on the health and happiness of the entire family.
Below are tips to regain balance between life and work.
Tell your employer you are unavailable during non-working hours except in an emergency.
Set a routine so you don't do any work at home unless your children are playing with friends or sleeping.
"New report: Smartphones increase workload and decrease productivity." This 2011 headline of a story from responsesource.com seems like quite the paradox. Smartphones aren't helping us and aren't making us smarter? You might not think it possible, but it very well could be.
A UK study suggests that the mere ownership of a BlackBerry or other smartphone does not decrease our workload, but actually increases our workload because we tend to check email more frequently, we're available all day every day, and our bosses know it, making us even more connected to our smartphones. However, Ian Price found that smartphones are not the answer to work/life balance.
Price conducted the study and wrote about the findings in his book The Activity Illusion. He found that smartphones do decrease anxiety about an influx of emails waiting to be read. However, this leads to a significant amount of time working during off-hours, taking time away from family, friends, and relaxing.
In the video below, Price succinctly states his interest in the psychology behind our new media and how social norms have not been developed for how to use the new technology.
Notice how he discussed social norms and the stigma surrounding people if they don't have others constantly in contact with them. In today's technology-ridden world, it's hard to unplug from devices. Unfortunately, men may be worse for wear when it comes to new media.
Studies show that career women are happier than career men. A 2011 CareerBliss of Irvine study of more than 200,000 company reviews, "reveals that overall, women outrank men in all factors of career happiness, specifically in areas concerning work-life balance, flexibility with their work schedule, career advancement and job security."
Some of the findings could be due in part to traditional families where the husband feels the duty to work harder or longer to provide more income. The difference in happiness could be related to technology use as well. Women tend to use technology to nurture relationships or to seek emotional bonds while men tend to use technology for informational purposes such as staying in touch with the office after hours. This could, in turn, lead to Price's argument regarding the social norms of using smartphones. But companies aren't focusing on the social norms but rather new interfaces for smartphones.
Enterproid, a start-up company in New York, is already dividing work from personal life with an app which will launch on the Android. The app creates two environments or profiles: one for your personal information and one for corporate information. Whichever profile is in use is protected from the rest of the phone. The hope is that you no longer have to worry about mixing personal and business life.
Of course, this doesn't solve the deeper problem of when technology is in use and for what purpose. Simply because you can separate personal and corporate information on your phone doesn't mean that you can separate the physical realities of work and life.
Until recently, I considered myself a cynical college student, especially in the realm of relationships. I thought I would always be single and my fear was that my last resort would be online dating. I, like others in society, felt that meeting someone online had a stigma. But now that people are working more, taking away precious soul-mate-finding time, the stigma around online dating is disappearing.
eHarmony is the first online dating service that I remember seeing advertised. Since then Cupid.com, match.com and perfectmatch.com are just a few of the hundreds of online dating sites. People's reasons for turning to online dating vary from being too shy to approach someone in person to a simple lack of time. Online dating is a plausible choice for striking a balance between work and personal life.
Anna Hennings and Tania Khadder from Excelle.com, a website devoted to career-women, predict in their 2009 article Online Dating: Why and How to Do It that online dating will become more common as both men and women work longer hours and have less free time. They also comment that, due to the loss of jobs and economic recession, more single people are staying home, or at the office.
In many professions, single people are expected to stay late, work weekends, or work holidays so that married employees can go home to their family. Rosalind Baker, a professional matchmaker, said the following in her 2009 article Work/Life Balance for Singles During the Recession:
Many singles tell me that more is expected of them at work because they don't have a spouse waiting for them at home. [...] The married people in her department have to be home for dinner with the family by 7 pm so if there is something that has to be completed urgently it's left up to her to stay. [...] Rarely do the married staff stay behind.
What people still need in life is a companion. No matter how much time work demands, people have an innate drive to find a life partner, and online dating makes it possible. But what if you are already married or dating someone and don't need online dating? Chances are you still need to find balance between work and relationships.
You can spend your whole life worrying about having more time or more money or more energy. However, true fulfillment begins with recovering the time that you might be “losing” within every moment you are alive. Think about it: now is the only time that you can truly live in.
The Ballis' recommend truly listening to the other person instead of thinking about the next thing you want to say. Following that guideline is especially important in online dating when trying to learn about another person.
If you find yourself short on time, don't worry, online dating is losing its stigma and is slowly becoming normal.
How was it possible to write research papers before computers, especially laptops? What was writing like before font styles, color choices, and print size? Not to mention typing multiple drafts because of one mistake. As a college student, I don't know what I would do without my laptop (or a desktop computer). Despite my quality typing skills acquired in 7th grade, the backspace key gets a lot of hits due to my typos and my constantly changing train of thought.
Personal typing technology used to consist of a typewriter followed by a word processor, both of which only allowed typing on paper stuck between the rollers. Now, we have word processing programs on our computers, allowing our laptops to be used for schoolwork, from literally producing the writing in Word to looking up information on the Internet.
Walking around North Dakota State University, I notice people on their laptops before, during, and after class. What could they possibly be doing for all that time? Does this constant laptop use get in the way of our personal life or does it take us away from our work? An article from February 14, 2010 called "Till Gadget Do We Part" on the Economic Times website discusses how couples' laptop use puts strain, and sometimes struggle, on their relationships.
The article states that being constantly connected to a laptop for work-related purposes can put strain on a relationship. For example, instead of watching television and relaxing with your significant other after supper, you are drawn instead to checking your email or finishing up a report for the next day, possibly causing some resentment from your partner.
According to research done by Boston College and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell researchers in 2005, students who use their laptops for schoolwork, especially writing papers, performed better on a Massachusetts standardized test. In contrast, students who spent ample time on their laptops for recreation didn't do as well in the standardized test's reading category. With the ability to multitask so easily, college students actually use their laptops for work, for fun, and for keeping in touch with family... all simultaneously.
In a March 2010 article by Eric Adler and Laura Bauer, experts agree to disagree. Some say that technology will potentially destroy relationships while others believe that relationships will flourish. I suppose it all comes down to personal control, however, for college students, opting out of laptop usage is almost impossible.
It's amazing that simple typewriters and word processors have evolved into laptops that allow us to work, play, and maintain (or mess up) personal relationships at the same time. Researchers are still in hot debate about the positives and negatives of laptops for students, but I think most of us would agree that we couldn't get along without them.
Prairie flowers in N.D. home-and-garden.webshots.com
A beautiful field, blooming with flowers. The sparkling snow covering the earth. The crunch of leaves under your feet. Are you too busy to enjoy the simple things in life? Between keeping up at work and spending time with family, it's difficult to think deeply about life... especially with a smartphone in your hands.
What does technology mean to us? Could we live without it anymore? Mike Daisey, an actor, commentator, and general jack-of-all-trades is opening a one-man show about the effects of iPhones and Steve Jobs on our lives.
In an article from the San Francisco Examiner, author Georgia Rowe discusses Daisey's newest show where he shares his trip to Foxconn, a company in China, where about half of the world's electronics are made.
Located in Shenzhen, a former fishing village, it is a hellish place where 400,000 people — many of them children — work 32-hour shifts and sleep stacked to the ceiling in tiny concrete bunkers. This, he discovered, is where iPods are made — not by machines, but by his fellow humans, some of whom are so stressed they are committing suicide by jumping off the factory roof. Foxconn employs 800,000 people and incidents of suicide are not few and far between.
Police said the man survived after cutting himself in his dormitory room at the factory, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said the 25-year-old man, surnamed Chen, migrated from central Hunan province and began working at Foxconn two months ago.
The 12 previous suicide attempts at Foxconn Technology Group’s operations in southern China involved workers who jumped from buildings. Two survived. Another worker killed himself in January at a factory in northern China.
Yes this is horrible, you're probably thinking, but what does this mean for me and my technology use? An October 2010 Associated Press-mtvU Poll found that 25% of college students reported that it would be a relief to be without their new technology. They feel pressured to answer texts and phone calls and periodically feel nervous or anxious when waiting for a reply to a text. Also, people are more exposed to negative attributes like flaming or hacking.
Next time you go outside, leave your phone in your pocket and breathe in some stress-free minutes like those at the Foxconn company are surely craving.
Fifteen degrees below zero didn't bother me much this morning until I attempted to start my car. Over and over, I cranked the key, desperately willing my wonderful 1995 Dodge Intrepid to turn over. Guess it wasn't brave enough to battle the bitterly cold weather. My solution: pull out my cell phone to call my dad. No answer. Luckily my mom answered her cell phone and drove to my aid.
There is constant conversation regarding the pros and cons of cell phones especially when it comes to work/life balance. Both of my parents were at work. More than likely, my dad was in a meeting with his cell phone off, inhibiting his ability to balance the needs of his daughter with the demands of his job. Contrastingly, my mom had access to her phone at her job and had the ability to simply leave to take care of something personal.
According to a 2007 study by the Australian National University (ANU), 58% of men responded that it would be 'difficult' or 'impossible' to do their job without a cell phone while only 35% of women felt this way. The study also discussed the use of cell phones over the holidays, finding that 59% of managers were likely to use their cell phones during the holidays.
The study concluded that:
Wireless mobile devices increase the scope for work and family flexibility by enabling the micro-coordination of time, tasks, and schedules. This is particularly significant as people are now working at times and places outside of the traditional workday and place. It is widely believed that technologies like the mobile phone and e-mail are blurring boundaries between personal life and the workplace.
A 2008 article from The Washington Post provides research completed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that suggests families are not worse off because of technology. Twenty-five percent of respondents said that they are actually closer families because they are able to keep in contact throughout the day. So, as in the ANU study, cell phones can have a positive effect on how people manage their work and personal life.
Work/life balance doesn't escape the ears of the cell phone companies who try to market their products to on-the-go people who need to stay in touch with their colleagues and their families. T-Mobile released a phone in 2010 that they claim promotes work/life balance because of its switchable home screen feature that allows users to go back and forth between business and personal screens.
Now it's 2011 and the number of people using their cell phone to stay connected to their job has increased, but companies like T-Mobile have made it easier to stay in balance. However, we need to remember that a cell phone can always be turned off and email can go unchecked for an evening. The important thing is to stay balanced.
